Chapter 2
two
The desert air is too warm, even as twilight slips between buildings and smooths the edges of the city. My footsteps echo against the concrete, a solitary rhythm in the vast expanse of Las Vegas.
Everyone else left Silver State Publishing hours ago, drifting out with takeout menus and easy laughs.
I stayed behind, telling myself I was unpacking my boxes and organizing files, which mostly looked like lining up my pens parallel to the keyboard and alphabetizing three stacks of manuscripts I won’t actually read tonight.
But mostly, I didn’t want anyone to see how badly my hands were still shaking.
Anxiety disguised as organization. If the spines sit flush, if the paperclips all face the same direction, maybe the noise in my head will quiet.
It doesn’t. Vegas hums through the walls, a neon heartbeat that never sleeps.
I told everyone I came for the chance to learn things on a smaller scale. Intimate. That’s true. It’s also not the whole truth. Mila stopped answering. Starting over felt safer than admitting I’m still scanning every lobby and crosswalk for my best friend’s face.
It wasn’t a bad day. Just a loud one. Fast. Unfamiliar. People here talk over each other, finish sentences that aren’t theirs, and make decisions on instinct and caffeine alone.
Before, when I was working in London, we scheduled brainstorming sessions like surgeries and emailed each other from desks ten feet apart.
I wore heels and pressed dresses and never once worried someone would ask me to edit a manuscript titled Motorcycle Lust and Moonshine before I’d even found my computer login password.
Things are a lot looser here. Unscripted. I’m not sure if that’s freeing or terrifying.
In London, HR called it a misunderstanding when my boss’s comments kept insisting we close the gap between mentor and mine. People can vanish in a city this wide, and I need a bit of disappearing right now.
I lock my office door, check it twice, then once more because twice is even but three makes my chest loosen.
Downstairs, the building’s lobby is a bright, over-polished aquarium.
Outside, my street corner is the opposite, all flickering lights and empty sidewalks, the kind of quiet that makes every sound feel like footsteps creeping up behind you.
I parked my car in the garage at my apartment building and chickened out on driving the Strip today.
I wait for a cab and tell myself tomorrow I’ll be braver.
The lamp above me stutters, on, off, on, and throws a stop-motion halo at my feet.
It probably once held a steady glow, but now is whimsical fluctuations.
Each flicker brings a brief dance of shadows, creating a transient, almost eerie atmosphere.
It was probably a mistake staying in the office so late.
A creak behind me. I turn. A man steps into the light. Not a ghost. I wish he were.
Ghosts wouldn’t make my pulse miscount like this.
They wouldn’t cast shadows or shift the air with the weight of their presence.
This man does. He moves like gravity answers to him first. My breath snags.
It’s half fear, half something I’m not sure what to name.
If he wanted to hurt me, I couldn’t stop him.
So I make myself follow the rules for panic: plant my feet, square my shoulders, unclench my jaw. Don’t fidget. Stay aware. Breathe.
I can’t imagine what he’d be doing here at this hour, but he could be thinking the same thing about me. My heart stumbles. Not quite panic, but close. I inhale the crisp desert air, which is suddenly colder than it was a moment ago.
He keeps coming. His steps slow, like he’s studying me.
Like he sees me.
That thought unmoors something in my chest. I’ve spent my whole life being overlooked. The quiet girl, the bookish girl, the background girl. But this man’s gaze lands like weight.
Two arm lengths away. That’s all.
And then—
Headlights cut through the darkness, scattering the moment. Relief makes my knees weak in a way that’s embarrassing even though no one can see inside my head.
My cab. Thank the universe.
I exhale hard, like I’ve been underwater, and stumble into the backseat without looking back. I rattle off my new address and risk a glance through the back window.
He’s still there. Watching. A shadow with a pulse.
I stare at him until his body shrinks into a dark speck and the city swallows him whole.
And even then, I still feel him. Static under my skin.
I turn the key in the lock of my apartment door and the reality of this new life presses in. The door swings open to reveal a space that still feels like it belongs to someone else. Boxes line the walls, sentinels of everything I haven’t dealt with. My footsteps echo too loudly in the emptiness.
The city hums just beyond the window.
I lean back against the door and close my eyes, wishing the quiet would soothe the ache beneath my ribs.
I lock the deadbolt. Then check it. Twice. Twist the chain. Three times. I’m twenty-eight, technically an adult, supposedly a fully functioning one, but I’ve never lived alone before. And if I’m being honest, it terrifies me.
Not the starting over part.
Not the man who was standing on the street.
The quiet. The silence that reminds me there’s no one in the next room. No one to call out to if something creaks, or breaks, or completely unravels. I want to learn how to be alone without it meaning abandoned. How to want things out loud and not apologize for the wanting.
It terrifies me so much that I told the guy who gave me a tour at work today that I couldn’t go out to the dinner I’d agreed to.
I told Wyatt that something came up. Which was a lie.
What came up was my chronic inability to be normal, and the overwhelming realization that I have no idea how to function as a single human unit.
The hardest part of living is the rules, the rehearsals, and how much of my life is avoiding making other people uncomfortable.
He was being kind. Probably. I doubt he was planning to murder me over pad thai and spring rolls. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how badly I’d mess it up. What if I talk too much? Or not enough? What if I get food in my teeth and he thinks I’m weird?
Which, I am.
So that wouldn't exactly be wrong.
Wyatt probably thinks I’m flaky and antisocial, and he’s not wrong about that either.
I set my bag down, line the strap along the counter’s edge, and try not to think about how a stranger’s gaze across an empty street felt like an answer to a prayer I didn’t know I was reciting.
I move to the window, drawn by the city’s glow. From up here, Vegas looks quieter than it is. From above, it’s a constellation of lives scattered across the desert, dreams and ambitions laid out before me.
Behind me, the kitchen light flickers once.
He’s still there.
The same ghost who’s been lingering since the day I moved in.
Charcoal suit, Bolo-Hat. Straight from The Thomas Crown Affair, or at least that’s what I told him the first time I saw him.
He didn’t laugh. He never does. He doesn’t bother me either. Mostly he just exists. Like a coat rack someone forgot to move.
Sometimes he disappears for hours, but he always comes back. Always to the same corner of the kitchen, hands folded neatly in front of him, watching everything and nothing.
I haven’t figured out who he was. Or what he’s waiting for.
I’m not scared of him. He’s predictable. Comforting, in a strange, spectral way. Which is more than I can say for most things in my life right now.
I’ve never been able to make them go away.
I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t see them.
They’re weather and my nervous system is the barometer.
Most days they’re commuters, crowding hallways, sitting in empty chairs, passing through crosswalks as though they still have somewhere to be.
Some days I see dozens of different ghosts, and other days, like today, it’s only one.
They rarely speak to me. They mostly linger, old memories who haven’t figured out they’re gone.
When I stick to my rules, less of them linger and the volume turns down.
When I slip up, when my life is loud, the dead talk over the living.
I’m a contradiction. I want them quiet, and I’m afraid of the day they leave me with nothing but quiet. I keep wishing for normal, for a day that doesn’t scrape me raw with other people’s endings. But if the ghosts go, they’ll take the last proof I’m not imagining myself.
Thinking back to Wyatt I realize that he never answered me, so I shoot off another text as I step away from the window and into the master bath.
Once it says delivered, I set the phone on the granite countertop and start brushing my teeth, trying not to spiral over whether or not that text made me sound needy.
My phone pings as I’m swishing minty mouthwash. I spit before picking it up.
Unknown:
You have the wrong number.
The wrong number? That can’t be right. I pull up my note app.
and realize it is in fact correct. I should’ve let Wyatt insert himself into my contacts like a normal person, but my anxiety over being here alone and not knowing him said absolutely not to handing a stranger my phone, public work building or not.
Way too many variables in that scenario, not to mention strange fingerprints on my screen would’ve tipped me into a full spiral right there by the copier.
So, I added his recited number to my notes, determined to never have a reason to need him as a permanent contact. That was until I had a small panic attack after everyone but me went home for the night and decided to cancel.
Oh, no. You’re right. I was off by one digit. I apologize.